SAN FRANCISCO — When former Vice President Kamala Harris strode onto The Masonic stage Sunday to debate her presidential marketing campaign memoir “107 Days,” it may have been a marketing campaign rally over again.
The sold-out crowd of greater than 3,000 folks stood in applause and cheered so loudly, they drowned out Harris’s hey to the town the place her political profession started twenty years in the past as San Francisco District Lawyer.
“It’s good to be home!” she mentioned.
In the course of the 90-minute dialog moderated by comic and actor D.L. Hughley, the previous state Lawyer Common and U.S. Senator shared the ache she felt on shedding final 12 months’s presidential race to Donald Trump, the modifications she would make to her marketing campaign, and the optimism she nonetheless has for America.
“No one can defeat your spirit if you don’t let them,” she mentioned.
Kamala Harris talks with comic and moderator D.L. Hughley throughout “A conversation with Kamala Harris” at The Masonic in San Francisco, Calif., on Sunday, Oct. 5, 2025. Harris was selling her ebook “107 Days” about her unsuccessful 2024 presidential bid. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Space Information Group)
Lots of those that attended the occasion — some from so far as San Diego and Sacramento — praised her message of hope as simply what they wanted after 9 months of the Trump administration, which has ramped up deportations of non-citizens who’re within the nation with out permission and is planning to ship extra Nationwide Guard troops to Democratic-led cities the place protesters have clashed with immigration brokers.
“I’m amazed that she’s still positive after everything that she went through and what’s happening to our country,” mentioned Amy Burkhart, a doctor from Napa. “I think it was important for us to hear a message like that — that we still don’t give up and that we need to work together because there’s more of us than there are of them.”
Harris’s ebook about her 107-day marketing campaign that started in July when President Biden dropped out of his re-election race offered 350,000 copies in its first week, among the best begins for a memoir since 2023, behind the books by Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, Prince Harry, in keeping with writer Simon & Schuster. San Francisco was her fifth cease on her 18-city ebook tour that features jaunts to London and Toronto, Canada.
“No one knows what the future holds,” Hughley mentioned.
“This is my freedom tour,” she mentioned with fun.
Kamala Harris speaks throughout “A conversation with Kamala Harris” at The Masonic in San Francisco, Calif., on Sunday, Oct. 5, 2025. Harris was selling her ebook “107 Days” about her unsuccessful 2024 presidential bid. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Space Information Group)
On the similar time, she lamented the paucity of protests towards Trump’s administration, the “capitulation” of legislation companies, universities and companies to “bend a knee at the foot of a tyrant,” and the political misinformation allowed by Silicon Valley’s social media firms.
“There are a lot of people here who work in the valley, who work on social media,” she mentioned. “We’ve got to figure out how we, within the industry and the discipline of technology, require as part of this ethos and moral obligation, ethical obligation, monitor truth versus bull–.”
Harris misplaced to Trump by a slim 1.5% of the nationwide vote, regardless of Trump successful all of the battleground states. In additional element than within the ebook, Harris described the ache she felt on election evening. She stored saying to herself, “My God, my God, my God,” she mentioned.
“I was grieving, and I was grieving for a long time, and I have not felt a similar kind of grief since my mother died,” Harris mentioned. “It was so painful, and it wasn’t about a win, it was about what I predicted was going to happen.”
She criticized Trump’s “weaponization” of the Justice Division to prosecute political enemies and for “lying” to voters that he would convey grocery costs down.
On the similar time, nevertheless, she acknowledged that she ought to have targeted extra of her marketing campaign on pocketbook points as an alternative of inexperienced expertise and infrastructure.
“We’re going to have to realize that the majority of people in our country are … having a difficult time buying groceries, having a difficult time paying rent, and part of what we’ve got to do is deal with the immediate,” she mentioned. “So if I had done it differently, I would have probably waited to do infrastructure and the Chips Act and done what we were working on, which is affordable child care, paid family leave and extended child tax credits.”
All through the on-stage dialogue, Hughley typically got here throughout as cynical about America after Trump’s win — “as a Black man living in this country for a long time,” he urged he’s not stunned by the racism folks appear free to specific now.
“I’m not really shocked about America being what it is now, because I think it was always there,” he mentioned.
Harris pushed again, nevertheless, saying that the election was not “a full statement about who we are as Americans,” and identified that one-third of registered voters voted for Trump, one-third voted for Harris and one-third didn’t vote.
“I think there’s deep work to be done, including with the Democratic Party,” she mentioned. For starters, she mentioned, Democrats should recover from “the ‘savior complex,” that focuses on discovering one chief to save lots of the get together.
As an alternative, the get together must help the newcomers who present promise to guide.
Illyasha Peete, 53, from Discovery Bay mentioned Harris’s November loss was devastating, however Harris’s speak Sunday “reinvigorated me to jump back in to the fight. My parents were civil rights activists with Martin Luther King and they taught us that our job is to kick down doors and hold them open for others, and maybe even push others in front of you. She reintroduced me to that belief.”
